Man United need a plan and the nerve to see it through – like Liverpool

Defeat in the Manchester derby was painful, but more galling still was the pliant, plaintive nature of it. The away section at the Etihad Stadium emptied out long before the final whistle; United’s fans have learned by repeated experience, over the last 12 years or so, to identify the precise moment when lingering hope curdles into delusion.

Even that was not the worst of it. At roughly the same time as Ruben Amorim was – once again – offering a stout defence of his system and his suitability for employment, André Onana was making his debut for Trabzonspor. The player who had most recently been identified as United’s weak link and scapegoated as the club’s problem was chosen as man of the match.

This is something of a pattern. On Thursday night, Napoli arrived in Manchester for a Champions League game against City with two high-profile former United players in their ranks, in the form of Rasmus Højlund and Scott McTominay, and one rather deeper cut. Vanja Milinkovic-Savic, the Italian champions’ towering Serbian goalkeeper, spent three years at Old Trafford a decade or so ago. He did not play a game for the club. His performance against City, keeping Napoli in the game for an hour or so with a string of fine saves, suggested he perhaps should have done.

That was the same night that Marcus Rashford, picked out by at least two United managers as a toxic presence in the dressing room and excised ruthlessly by Amorim over the summer, was scoring twice for his new team, Barcelona, against Newcastle in the Champions League. The impression is that almost everything that happens in football these days, whether they are involved or not, ends with Manchester United looking bad.

Quite how the club break out of this cycle is, in truth, something of a mystery. It is now a weekly ritual that Amorim appears in front of the massed ranks of the media and is asked, several times in several subtly but significantly different ways, if he might like to change his system. He is starting to get creative with his answers. He is often quite funny, as though he recognises the absurdity of the situation. On Friday, he managed to crowbar in a mention of the Pope.

The solution, then, is not going to be tactical. It does not appear to have been getting rid of Onana, or Rashford, or even Alejandro Garnacho, unceremoniously jeered when he arrived at Old Trafford sporting Chelsea’s colours for the first time. None of these have been the answer. They have tried changing the manager. They have reshuffled what the club’s ultimate owners, the Glazer family, would refer to as the front office.

They are left, then, with something much closer to hope than expectation. There had, not for the first time, been dark whispers during this latest, miserable week that Amorim’s position was under more intense scrutiny than normal, that he had an insert-number-of-games here to save his job. The visit of Chelsea may not have been the last-chance saloon, but it may have been next-door-but-one.

And then, within five minutes, Robert Sánchez had hared off his line in the pouring rain to close down Bryan Mbeumo, mistimed it, and been sent off. Within 15 minutes, United were winning and Chelsea had removed all three of their primary creative threats. By half-time, it was 2-0. United seemed set fair. Perhaps this was not going to be such a bad week, after all.

Thirty miles down the road, Arne Slot’s first-world problems just keep mounting. Yes, Liverpool are top of the Premier League. Yes, they have won every game they have played this season – since the Community Shield, anyway – and they have spent the summer committing retooling a squad that had just won the title with half a billion pounds of reinforcements.

But the Premier League did not become the omnipresent cultural force it is by worrying about the big picture. And Liverpool have not, in truth, been entirely serene in the opening weeks of the campaign. They have developed an unhealthy taste for the dramatic, for a start. When Diego Simeone, the Atlético Madrid manager, said his side had “suffered” Anfield after conceding in injury time in the Champions League on Wednesday. That, as The Anfield Wrap pointed out, is how the fans feel, too. “We don’t want to be in that situation,” Virgil Van Dijk said after that game, the fifth in which Liverpool have been forced to find a winner rather later than they would have liked. “We don’t want to have to chase games. We have to be able to kill them.”

In that, at least, they made some improvements yesterday. In a typically heated Merseyside derby, against a typically determined Everton, they managed to build a two-goal lead and then only throw away half of it, eventually riding out a nervous final 20 minutes or so relatively smoothly.

The same could be said of all of the other quibbles and queries over their start to the season. Florian Wirtz started the Merseyside derby on the bench; he has flickered, rather than shone, since his move from Bayer Leverkusen. Mohamed Salah has yet to discover his most devastating form. There is still the issue of where, or at least with whom, Alexander Isak will play.

These are, of course, little short of luxuries. Even Liverpool’s problems feel like measures of their strength as a club, proof that they are now the gold standard for how an elite team should be run. It is fair to say that things are going well when the most pressing issue to be resolved is that you are not winning games precisely as you would like.

When juxtaposed with United’s ongoing and seemingly inescapable malaise, of course, that feels like yet more salt in the wound. Given the rivalry between the clubs, that is unavoidable. At the same time, though, it is not ridiculous to say that Liverpool should also be United’s great source of hope.

It is a historical curiosity that while these clubs might be the most successful clubs in England, their fortunes rarely run in parallel. Liverpool tend to fall as United rise, and vice versa. It is not long since Liverpool found themselves in a comparable situation. True, they never dipped quite as low as Amorim’s team last season, but there were various points in the last three decades when it looked as though they might be at risk of drifting close to irrelevance.

The way they rescued themselves from that vortex should provide a blueprint for United. Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group, and their executives found a competitive edge – in the form of analytics – and exploited it ruthlessly. The process was accelerated considerably by their wealth; even in their fallow years, their history, the possibility of what could be again, was enough to tempt managers of the calibre of Rafael Benítez and then Jürgen Klopp, and players like Xabi Alonso and Luis Suárez.

United are the same now. Bryan Mbeumo and Benjamin Sesko both chose Old Trafford this summer despite offers from Newcastle, ones which brought with them the promise of Champions League football. The fall might be harder for the game’s giants, but the bounce tends to be higher. Logic dictates that United’s return is only a matter of time. It has been for 12 years.

His team holding onto a one-goal lead, Arne Slot was a study in calm. He stood impassively on the edge of technical area, hands in his pockets, removing one – occasionally – to remind Mohamed Salah to retain his focus as the game ticked into injury time. Slot’s serenity is one of his strengths. As Dominik Szoboszlai has said, it conveys to his players that he is in control.

With his team holding onto a one-goal lead, Ruben Amorim paced along the touchline, back and forth, back and forth, his eyes cast to the ground. United held out in the end, too, although that owed at least a little to Chelsea’s frequent lack of invention and absolute lack of composure.

“Even when everything is going well, we arrange something to make it complicated,” the manager said afterwards. His frustration was evident. His primary emotion, though, will be relief: this was not, in the end, quite as bad a week as it might have been.

Whether that indicates any sea-change in United’s fortune is difficult to tell. It was not the sort of game that could be repeated, a product more of its conditions – the pouring rain, the presence of Robert Sánchez – than either manager’s wisdom. The whole of the second half was played with both teams reduced to 10 after Casemiro was sent off, too. The pitch, at one point, resembled a swimming pool.

A far better guide to the future may have emerged on Wednesday, when United published their financial results. In what the club’s chief executive, Omar Berrada, described as a “challenging year,” one in which they did not receive a windfall for involvement in the Champions League, they still managed to bring in record revenues, their income of £666.5 million a small but noteworthy increase on the previous year. That “demonstrates the resilience which is a hallmark of Manchester United,” Berrada said.

This, of course, is the central tenet of the belief that United will – eventually – be restored. They are able to generate too much money to be cast into permanent irrelevance. “Nearly anyone can improve performance with large enough expenditure,” as Ian Graham, one of the architects of Liverpool’s modern success, writes in How To Win The Premier League.

In reality, that is only probably true. The comparison with Liverpool’s experiences in the 1990s and 2000s is close, but not perfect. The landscape of the game has changed so much that no parallel can be exact. Even without the commercial heft that reinforced United’s primacy, Liverpool could still pay far better salaries than almost all of the teams they were tasked with overtaking. They were not nearly as rich as United are now, but the money they did have went further.

That is not true of United, two decades on. They might have more money than most, but everyone involved in the Premier League is unfathomably wealthy. It is not just Liverpool who can name substitutes’ benches full of impossibly expensive players: so can Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham. Newcastle and Aston Villa are not far behind. Brighton and Bournemouth make the money they have go much further than almost anyone else in world football.

To get back to where they once were, United will need more than resources; they will need vision and conviction and, most of all, they will need nerve. That, as Graham makes clear in his book, is what eventually placed Liverpool back on their perch: the club adopting a strategy and sticking to it, regardless of how many of those bad weeks they had. And the test of that, ultimately, is not in how jubilant they are in victory, but how they behave when they next taste defeat.

Photograph by Alex Livesey/Getty Images